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Our Cosmic Habitat

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Martin Rees masterpiece remains for sure "Just Six Numbers". In a few pages, he has been able to track the most intriguing mysteries of physics, by explaining how small changes in "just six numbers" could have prevented us from being...
The idea behing this book is to cover quite broadly all the aspects of modern cosmology. The question which permeates the entire book is "is our existence just an accident, or do we exist because we had to (i.e. the laws of physics imply our existence)"? This is currently THE question in cosmology. After having tracked and measured the most significant quantities that set the laws of our universe, we have started to question "why" those numbers have the values that allows for our existence.
Of course there is no answer in the book, but what is disappointing is that the book just looks like a collection of short stories and information already seen in other books.
Whoever has already read books on cosmology, quantum mechanics and relativity will find just a repetition of short summaries, with a little characterisation by the author.
The good point is that this book can surely be a good starter for neophytes.

I've only just started this book and am only thirty or so pages in, but I've already decided that it's one of the best books of its kind that I've ever read. I don't know what it is, exactly, about Rees, but his writings are always the most understandable expositions of scientific concepts and evidence out there, at least to me. Sure, there are many other fine writers, but none of them can do quite what Rees does. I do have an initial observation I would like to offer, however:

If God created the universe and there is no other intelligent life out there, or any life at all, then he's a wasteful idiot. Just imagine the vastness of space - are you telling me he needed that much room just to make us?

If the universe came about due to natural forces and there is no other intelligent life out there, or any life at all, then the universe is a stupid, idiotic place. Just imagine that vastness again - are you telling me that either the universe needed that much space just to produce us, or that in all that vastness it could not come up with anything else?

I'm prepared for either event and I don't really care if there is intelligent life "out there" or not, but I know at least one thing - the absence of life/intelligence outside of earth would be solid proof of either God's or the unvierse's inadequacy.

Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, wonderfully tells everything about cosmology in this concise book. The reader is lead to a quick tour from Big Bang to biospheres, from the beginning to the end of the universe, and from the micro-world to the cosmos. Yet the description is not superficial but very deep.

Among many of mysteries we learn from this book, let me mention only a few big ones. (1) Dark matter: This prevails over visible matter in constituting the total energy of the universe. It is the No. 1 problem in astronomy today, and ranks high as a physics problem, too. (2) Vacuum energy: This is the origin of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Its nature is a challenge to theorists; it holds important clues to the early universe and the nature of space. (3) Other universes: Our universe may be just one of them. While seeming to be in the province of metaphysics rather than physics, these already lie within the proper purview of science.

The author says that the phrases often used in popular books, "final theory" and "theory of everything," are very misleading and that some of nature's complexity may never be explained and understood. These words just made the scales fall from my eyes. I strongly recommend this book to laypersons interested in astronomy, cosmology, problems at the boundary between science and philosophy, and the deep mysteries of nature.

The first nine chapters of this rather small book give us an excellent summary of our actual scientific and speculative cosmological knowledge.
In the last two chapters the author explains why he believes that the history of our universe is just an episode (a particular Big Bang) in an infinite multiverse (see also Lee Smolin's 'The Life of the Cosmos').

This clearly written (a bonus) book tackles also other important items, like the risk for an encounter with a devastating asteroid, the impact of a unified theory on science, or the still more demote cosmic status of humanity - we are even not made of the dominant stuff in our universe.

A very interesting read. Not to be missed.

Reading this book, my first in cosmology, I felt a bit like Jodie Foster in "Contact". It is doubtful you will find a better introduction to cosmology, particularly because through much of it, with a little imagination, Rees makes you feel you are riding a spacecraft. I have read two other books on theoretic physics since reading this one: Hawking's "Brief History of Time" and Kaku's "Hyperspace"; all three books focus on some of the main points since the modern concepts of physics are commonly held views. All three, which incidentally are all reader-friendly on this difficult subject, cover the chemistry of stars, quantum mechanics, the formation of galaxies, the history and future of the universe. In my opinion, 3 is better than 1. Rees' unique focus is on cosmic numbers; Kaku's focus is on higher dimensions and superstring theory; Hawking's is on black holes and the Big Bang.

Our Cosmic Habitat written by Martin J. Rees is a book that looks at the fundamentals and conjectures of our galaxy and for that matter, of what we know, the universe.

To link the cosmos and the microworld requires a breakthrough. Twentieth-century physics rests on two great foundations: the quantum principle(that which governs the "inner space" of atoms) and Einstein's relativity theory, which describes time, outer space, and gravity but doesn't incorporate quantum effects.

Yet looking at the two great foundations you'd think that physics could link the two, well, surprise... they haven't. The structures erected on the foundations are still as far apart as the day they were proposed. Until there is a unified theory of the forces governing both cosmos and microworld, we won't be able to understand the fundamental features of our universe... the superstring theory shows the most promiss.

Superstring or M-theory in which each point in our ordinary space is actually a tightly folded in six dimensions, wrapped up on scales perhaps a billion billion times smaller than an atomic nucleus, and particles are represented as vibrating loops of "string."

As you can see this can get pretty deep, but the author has written this book so it can be easily understood and comprehended by the layreader. The author has a very effective prose and the narrative moves quickly and the reader gets a tour-de-force in the study of cosmology.

The book has three parts and each part has chapters. The chapters break the information down into easily understood groupings. A view of a multiverse or may universesis not just found in science-fiction anymore. It seems that the multiverse is getting play from those who are willing to venture out.

All in all, this was a very readable and engrossing read. It moved quickly and there are illustrating within the book that help in explaining different aspects of what the author is relaying to the reader. The book requires that the reader has some science background to get the most out of the book.

Einstein once asked whether God could have made the world any differently; here, Rees, England's Astronomer Royal, offers an answer. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Princeton, Rees's meditations on the origins of the universe and the laws of physics begin with the planets and stars that make up the visible universe. While Giordiano Bruno and other philosophers speculated that distant worlds might be as hospitable to life as ours is, only in the last decade has science begun to detect planets beyond the solar system. Scientists who argue that life is the inevitable product of commonplace physical conditions have little better evidence on their side than those who believe it to be a rare cosmic fluke. What they do agree on is the general uniformity of physical laws throughout the observable universe. Gravity pulls at the same strength, and the relative masses and charges of the elementary particles remain constant. All this can be accounted for by a single creation event, popularly known as the Big Bang. Radio astronomy has given theorists a good idea of what conditions were like only a fraction of a second after the Bang. But theory cannot account for certain apparently arbitrary parameters, such as the relative abundances of matter and antimatter, or the comparative strengths of the different forces that act on all matter. What would happen if these parameters were different? Could there exist universes in which they are in fact different? Rees (Before the Beginning, 1997) suggests that other "bubbles" of reality might exist in unreachable dimensions, each with its own physical laws. Nor are these alternate universes necessarily beyond the reach of science; interesting theories prompt scientists to find ways to test them, and the future promises to be every bit as interesting as the past. A provocative survey of modern cosmology for readers who want the big picture.

Our Cosmic Habitat
By Martin Rees
Astronomer Royal
of Great Britain
Princeton University Press, ...
I am here to explain the universe to you, courtesy of Martin Rees, research professor at Cambridge (the one in England) and the UK's Astronomer Royal (the head telescope dude).
First of all, remember that the universe is a big place. No, I mean really, really big. For example, our little solar system resides in a rather small galaxy that has more than 100 billion suns (no, we don't know who counted them). Our nearest neighbor galaxy is Andromeda and if you could get your Piper Cub up to 186,000 miles per second it would take you two million years to get there (also known as two light years), even downhill.
Want more? Our galaxy (we call it the Milky Way), Andromeda and about 35 smaller satellite galaxies in our neighborhood are all part of a larger group of galaxies centered on the Virgo Cluster, about 50 million light years away. Still further away but still part of our group is the Great Wall, what Rees calls a "sheetlike array of galaxies" about 200 million light years away, give or take a few hundred miles.
But that's not all; nope, as close as anyone can tell, there may be billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars and thousands of billions of planets. They're everywhere, man, everywhere.
Rees and his buddies up at the observatory know this because thanks to the Hubble space telescope and some computer magic, they can see further out into space than ever before. In fact, they now figure than can see as far as 10 billion light years away.
Of course, since they are seeing light (and various rays) coming at us, that means they are actually looking back in time 10 billion years.
Imagine.
And they're not done yet. Rees thinks that when bigger, new space telescopes are erected, they'll be able to see all the way back 14 billion light years to the "big bang," or the creation of the universe when everything that there is - every dog, plane, building, molecule, proton, ocean, planet, galaxy - everything! - was compressed into an object the size of a golf ball.
You can imagine how heavy that would be.
For some reason, unbeknownst still to us astrophysicists, on a Thursday afternoon 14 billion years ago (give or take ...) it all went BLAM! (with about 800 zeroes after it) and created our known universe. Now it was pretty hot; in fact, the entire universe was hotter than the sun for a while so there aren't many records laying about.
But after a few hundred thousand years, things began to cool down (at least, to the surfaces temperature of the sun) and form into stars, clusters of stars and eventually galaxies, all whirling about in a seemingly random pattern but, still, expanding away from the center at a measurable speed. There are still some curiosities about all this - for example, why are some expanding faster than others?
And us physicists believe it's all being held together by some force we can't quite detect but which we've all agreed to call "dark matter." This force (some call it "anti-matter") has to exist for it all to work.
Rees also admits that not everyone in the PhD community agrees on everything. For example, we're all still searching for "the theory of everything" which, basically, explains how all this works, because some evidence that's provable contradicts other evidence that's also provable. Confusing, wot?
Not quite there yet, and, Rees says, we may never be.
BLACK HOLES
A term coined in 1968 to refer to mysterious places in space where gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape it and into which everything in its neighborhood is being sucked and compressed. Avoid them.
Problem is, some of these Black Holes are pretty big, as big as our whole solar system. Maybe bigger.
Well, you can see that the universe is a pretty strange place and we haven't even touched on time travel, microworlds or the possibility of multiple universes co-existing with ours. All the more reason to pick up your copy of Our Cosmic Habitat.
If you think you know the answer to some of these puzzles, drop a note to Rees at Cambridge. We're sure he'd appreciate it.
- Wayman Dunlap

This book is what I would call a big-picture overview of the cosmos. It is discussed from all sized scales and from the viewpoint of a possible multiverse. The forces and constants of Nature are the philosophical subjects from these horizons. They certainly are fine-tuned for life, biophilic, since it (life) could not exist with any slight alterations in them. And if there is a multiverse, then just as placements of galaxy clusters are results of our own cosmic history, our own universe's physical laws may only be bylaws that are not mulitversal, they may likewise be historic accidents-ones that sustain an intelligent cosmos. I recommend this to those who want a condensed but comprehensive overview of cosmology, because it is nothing outstanding or profound but a practical guide to begin thought about the cosmos' and our own beginnings.

This is the first book by Martin Rees I have read, and I like it.
He created very brief (about 200 pages only) but surprisingly complete picture of modern cosmology and scientific fields related to it.
After reading Alan Guth, Donald Goldsmith, Stephen Hawking and Igor Novikov, this book greatly summarizes and helps to put everything together: properties of our Universe, current conclusions from observations, microphysics dilemmas, speculations about time and multiverses and possible barriers further research may encounter.
Introducing Q number, Martin Rees explains cosmic texture.
Presenting simple equation for gravitational attraction he makes easy to understand negative energy of vacuum (this unfortunately in Notes, at the end of the book; should be introduced within the main text in my opinion).
I was shocked learning that our empty space could be vulnerable to a catastrophic transfiguration induced artificially by high- energy particle collisions in accelerator experiments (more about it on page 120).
Content of this book is for educated and oriented readers; author does not waste time to explain basic terms of physics. One should know for example what is "bar code" in the spectra from the galaxies.
Small correction: figure 4.1 (page 52) describes numbers:0.1 , 0.2 and 0.3 as a redshift. This is not exactly.
These numbers are related to the redshift but they represent fraction of a time since a big bang.
Concluding: if you like to read about cosmology, it is not the only subject of your interest and you want fast update - get "Our Cosmic Habitat". It will save you lots of time.